II

Had this background of the essays been more explicitly depicted, I do

not know whether they would have met with more acceptance, but it is

likely that they would not have met with so many misunderstandings.

But the essays, save for slight incidental references, took this

background for granted in the allusions to the universe of

non-reflectional experience of our doings, sufferings, enjoyments of

the world and of one another. It was their purpose to point out that

reflection (and, hence, knowledge having logical properties) arises

because of the appearance of incompatible factors within the empirical

situation just pointed at: incompatible not in a mere structural or

static sense, but in an active and progressive sense. Then opposed

responses are provoked which cannot be taken simultaneously in overt

action, and which accordingly can be dealt with, whether

simultaneously or successively, only after they have been brought into

a plan of organized action by means of analytic resolution and

synthetic imaginative conspectus; in short, by means of being taken

cognizance of. In other words, reflection appears as the dominant

trait of a situation when there is something seriously the matter,

some trouble, due to active discordance, dissentiency, conflict among

the factors of a prior non-intellectual experience; when, in the

phraseology of the essays, a situation becomes tensional.[2]

Given such a situation, it is obvious that the meaning of the

situation as a whole is uncertain. Through calling out two opposed

modes of behavior, it presents itself as meaning two incompatible

things. The only way out is through careful inspection of the

situation, involving resolution into elements, and a going out beyond

what is found upon such inspection to be given, to something else to

get a leverage for understanding it. That is, we have (_a_) to locate

the difficulty, and (_b_) to devise a method of coping with it. Any

such way of looking at thinking demands moreover that the difficulty

be located _in_ the situation in question (very literally in

question). Knowing always has a _particular_ purpose, and its solution

must be a function of its conditions in connection with _additional_

ones which are brought to bear. Every reflective knowledge, in other

words, has a specific task which is set by a concrete and empirical

situation, so that it can perform that task only by detecting and

remaining faithful to the conditions in the situation in which the

difficulty arises, while its purpose is a reorganization of its

factors in order to get unity.

So far, however, there is no accomplished knowledge, but only knowledge

coming to be--learning, in the classic Greek conception. Thinking gets

no farther, as _thinking_, than a statement of elements constituting

the difficulty at hand and a statement--a propounding, a

proposition--of a method for resolving them. In fixing the framework of

every reflective situation, this state of affairs also determines the

further step which is needed if there is to be knowledge--knowledge in

the eulogistic sense, as distinct from opinion, dogma, and guesswork,

or from what casually passes current as knowledge. Overt action is

demanded if the worth or validity of the reflective considerations is

to be determined. Otherwise, we have, at most, only a hypothesis that

the conditions of the difficulty are such and such, and that the way to

go at them so as to get over or through them is thus and so. This way

must be tried in action; it must be applied, physically, in the

situation. By finding out what then happens, we test our intellectual

findings--our logical terms or projected metes and bounds. If the

required reorganization is effected, they are confirmed, and reflection

(on that topic) ceases; if not, there is frustration, and inquiry

continues. That all knowledge, as issuing from reflection, is

experimental (in the literal physical sense of experimental) is then a

constituent proposition of this doctrine.

Upon this view, thinking, or knowledge-getting, is far from being the

armchair thing it is often supposed to be. The reason it is not an

armchair thing is that it is not an event going on exclusively within

the cortex or the cortex and vocal organs. It involves the

explorations by which relevant data are procured and the physical

analyses by which they are refined and made precise; it comprises the

readings by which information is got hold of, the words which are

experimented with, and the calculations by which the significance of

entertained conceptions or hypotheses is elaborated. Hands and feet,

apparatus and appliances of all kinds are as much a part of it as

changes in the brain. Since these physical operations (including the

cerebral events) and equipments are a part of thinking, thinking is

mental, not because of a peculiar stuff which enters into it or of

peculiar non-natural activities which constitute it, but because of

what physical acts and appliances _do_: the distinctive purpose for

which they are employed and the distinctive results which they

accomplish.

That reflection terminates, through a definitive overt act,[3] in

another non-reflectional situation, within which incompatible

responses may again in time be aroused, and so another problem in

reflection be set, goes without saying. Certain things about this

situation, however, do not at the present time speak for themselves

and need to be set forth. Let me in the first place call attention to

an ambiguity in the term "knowledge." The statement that all

knowledge involves reflection--or, more concretely, that it denotes

an inference from evidence--gives offense to many; it seems a

departure from fact as well as a wilful limitation of the word

"knowledge." I have in this Introduction endeavored to mitigate the

obnoxiousness of the doctrine by referring to "knowledge which is

intellectual or logical in character." Lest this expression be

regarded as a futile evasion of a real issue, I shall now be more

explicit. (1) It may well be admitted that there is a real sense in

which knowledge (as distinct from thinking or inquiring with a guess

attached) does not come into existence till thinking has terminated in

the experimental act which fulfils the specifications set forth in

thinking. But what is also true is that the object thus determined is

an object of _knowledge_ only because of the thinking which has

preceded it and to which it sets a happy term. To run against a hard

and painful stone is not of itself, I should say, an act of knowing;

but if running into a hard and painful thing is an outcome predicted

after inspection of data and elaboration of a hypothesis, then the

hardness and the painful bruise which define the thing as a stone also

constitute it emphatically an object of knowledge. In short, the

object of knowledge in the strict sense is its objective; and this

objective is not constituted till it is reached. Now this

conclusion--as the word denotes--is thinking brought to a close, done

with. If the reader does not find this statement satisfactory, he

may, pending further discussion, at least recognize that the doctrine

set forth has no difficulty in connecting knowledge with inference,

and at the same time admitting that knowledge in the emphatic sense

does not exist till inference has ceased. Seen from this point of

view, so-called immediate knowledge or simple apprehension or

acquaintance-knowledge represents a critical skill, a certainty of

response which has accrued in consequence of reflection. A like

sureness of footing apart from prior investigations and testings is

found in instinct and habit. I do not deny that these may be better

than knowing, but I see no reason for complicating an already too

confused situation by giving them the name "knowledge" with its usual

intellectual implications. From this point of view, the subject-matter

of knowledge is precisely that which we do _not_ think of, or mentally

refer to in any way, being that which is taken as matter of course,

but it is nevertheless knowledge in virtue of the inquiry which has

led up to it.

(2) Definiteness, depth, and variety of meaning attach to the objects

of an experience just in the degree in which they have been previously

thought about, even when present in an experience in which they do not

evoke inferential procedures at all. Such terms as "meaning,"

"significance," "value," have a double sense. Sometimes they mean a

function: the office of one thing representing another, or pointing to

it as implied; the operation, in short, of serving as sign. In the

word "symbol" this meaning is practically exhaustive. But the terms

also sometimes mean an inherent quality, a quality intrinsically

characterizing the thing experienced and making it worth while. The

word "sense," as in the phrase "sense of a thing" (and non-sense) is

devoted to this use as definitely as are the words "sign" and "symbol"

to the other. In such a pair as "import" and "importance," the first

tends to select the reference to another thing while the second names

an intrinsic content. In reflection, the extrinsic reference is always

primary. The height of the mercury means rain; the color of the flame

means sodium; the form of the curve means factors distributed

accidentally. In the situation which follows upon reflection, meanings

are intrinsic; they have no instrumental or subservient office,

because they have no office at all. They are as much qualities of the

objects in the situation as are red and black, hard and soft, square

and round. And every reflective experience adds new shades of such

intrinsic qualifications. In other words, while reflective knowing is

instrumental to gaining control in a troubled situation (and thus has

a practical or utilitarian force), it is also instrumental to the

enrichment of the immediate significance of subsequent experiences.

And it may well be that this by-product, this gift of the gods, is

incomparably more valuable for living a life than is the primary and

intended result of control, essential as is that control to having a

life to live. Words are treacherous in this field; there are no

accepted criteria for assigning or measuring their meanings; but if

one use the term "consciousness" to denote immediate values of

objects, then it is certainly true that "consciousness is a lyric cry

even in the midst of business." But it is equally true that if someone

else understands by consciousness the function of effective

reflection, then consciousness is a business--even in the midst of

writing or singing lyrics. But the statement remains inadequate until

we add that knowing as a business, inquiry and invention as

enterprises, as practical acts, become themselves charged with the

meaning of what they accomplish as _their_ own immediate quality.

There exists no disjunction between aesthetic qualities which are

final yet idle, and acts which are practical or instrumental. The

latter have their own delights and sorrows.